Ever since Autre began offering his two cents on fashion, people here and beyond have wanted to know one thing: Who is this guy? He posts in volumes on a range of subjects that are, somehow, related to fashion. He has influenced the opinion and debate on this blog. At least one other blog has attempted to recruit him. I often think he is trying with his writing to produce more than a thought — perhaps a whole catalog of thoughts, emotions, and impressions that don’t always seem clear or intelligible to us. Still, we keep reading.
About five months ago, Autre sent me an essay he had written about fashion criticism, using as his literary scalpel the film “The Silence of the Lambs.” I was intrigued, and after reading all 7,000 words, I said I’d publish it (with some trimming) on the blog. I especially liked how he saw a table-turning Imitation of Christ show.
Autre also revealed that his name is Marko. He is from Ljubljana, in Slovenia. He has studied art history, French language and literature, and he is now a junior researcher (and Ph.D candidate) in the department of art history, at the University of Ljubljana. When I started the blog, people told me it should follow a certain form, but, frankly, that idea just oppressed me. Why should fashion, which is so astonishing, perverse, neurotic and original, be confined to a form? So, here is your recommended reading in time for Fashion Week: Marko’s imaginative critique of fashion criticism, beginning with the keenly critical and hungry Hannibal.
Silence of Style
You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes?
If we think of the films that captivate the fashion world, “Silence of the Lambs” would probably not be among them. Yet not only does this film serve up some uncanny fashion points — from Buffalo Bill, the “couturier” who sews himself a new self from the flesh of others, to Hannibal’s stinging critique of Clarice’s attire — it also plays havoc with our assumptions about fashion and fashion criticism. It tells us how to see, and that perhaps we are not seeing enough or at quite the right distance to avoid moralizing, one of the traps in contemporary fashion criticism. If we long for a more intense, more cogent, more physical experience when reading about fashion, it may be because we need a new way of thinking about it.
In the script, Clarice’s appearance is rendered as sharply as one of Hannibal’s drawings. Her jailhouse attire is dully feminine, and she’s carrying her best bag that doesn’t match her second-rate shoes. Anxious, she passes Multiple Miggs’ cell. He can smell her, he says. Odor di femina. Odor di verità? Upon reaching Hannibal’s cell, she sees him lounging on his bunk, reading Italian Vogue. A deceptively prosaic moment omitted from the film. She introduces herself, but he wants to see her credentials first, saying: “Closer, clo–ser.” Things begin to fall into place: dress, smell, identity. Closeness. Anxiety. Screaming silence.
After glancing at her, he starts inquiring. What did Miggs say to her? Well, Hannibal says he can’t smell it himself. Nevertheless, he then proceeds to sniff the air,more expertly. He can tell she uses Evian skin cream, sometimes L’Air du Temps, but not today. A safe choice, a presumed traditionalist’s choice, as if she were going for the air of substance, buying identity, buying into rich history. And isn’t that what somehow unites Clarice with Buffalo Bill? Trying to get out, like that butterfly from its cocoon, by coveting a thing, having ambition? She comes to Hannibal in order to solve a problem, the case of Buffalo Bill, but this leads to another one — that silent scream of an innocent lamb being slaughtered like Hannibal’s victims. Triggered beyond control, it haunts her memory. No wonder Hannibal says to her that she needs to look deep within herself first — because she already has answers. Ask yourself what you see. Nothing remotely easy about exercising one’s eyes, seeing and reading. Having the power to avoid looking away. Remember Hannibal’s Belvedere: not just a beautiful view (of the Duomo in Florence) but also “to fully grasp with one’s eyes,” “to see properly, clearly.” Bel vedere. And won’t that be a town in Ohio where Bill lives?“I can see nothing.”
“On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.”
It’s almost funny how little Hannibal needs to read her. He strategically snaps and tells Clarice how she looks. Like a rube, a well-scrubbed rube with actually only a little taste. One generation away from poor white West Virginia trash. All she could do was dream of getting out. Clearly agitated by his ability to read her motives and common fears of being common, even though she never truly was, her retort is probably a mere defense. Nonethless, her point is crucial. “You see a lot,” she says. She is trying to turn the tables on Hannibal. In a moment, we will see how, and where, this happened in the fashion world.
Why all this reference to smell, to the smell of truth? And to surface, not depth? We’re not superficial enough, I guess. Maybe the most difficult thing of all is unveiling the obvious, something that is simply there, yet unnoticed. There is definitely a logic to the reference of smell, usually seen as the lowest sense of them all, where we’re supposedly closest to animals. A logic of elusiveness that we must retain. And isn’t smell always related to closeness? Well, if Hannibal sniffs things out, this simply means that, when it comes to truth, we cannot rely on old, firm, unchangeable methods. It means constant thinking, rethinking, discarding and starting from zero over and over again, even suspending what we already know. How should we take Hannibal’s words, pointing at Clarice? Should we simply learn from his procedure, apply it to a different domain, that of fashion? Is it truly a matter of applying or does the film echo something already present in the fashion world? When he snaps at Clarice, is it an insult, a basic, and base, critique of her fashion choices? Or, does he make things, herself mostly, a certain core of her identity, visible to her? If we were to opt for the first possibility, we could end up saying that Hannibal is some sort of critic, even a pretentious, petty arbiter of good taste and morals. Since good taste is still seen as cleanliness preserved, a sign of a progressive and spotless spirit, Hannibal could then be a judgemental moral catechist, possessed by the idea that “something bad is happening.” He could be standing as the corrective of our decadent times, when every standard is disintegrating. And somehow he wouldn’t be far from mere gossip mongers, since they share their logic with the Moral Majority, both being obsessed by what’s going on behind their neighbour’s door.
The second option is therefore more inviting, and it even throws a different light on the first possibility. With Hannibal’s words, by fearlessly accepting his quid pro quo, Clarice finds herself in the place of truth, faced with the opacity of her desire, and mostly Bill’s, of course. This doesn’t mean that Hannibal is the master of truth. He can simply pinpoint it with his words, provoking shame. No wonder he had to be conceived as a cannibal, as someone who will (literally) eat you up, taking everything from you, leaving you with perhaps only your ability to lose. Therein lays our fascination with him, with evil, and our enjoyment upon hearing his words, smelling and reading Clarice as if he were doing it to us.
Two other film examples, different yet closely linked, can take us further down the road of identity, a fashionable topic if we consider all the talk about individuality and being yourself. Marcelo Kraslicic’s short movie for Kai Kühne’s Myself, featuring Chloë Sevigny, and the bathroom scene from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” In both cases, we’re dealing with the mirror or the perils of the looking glass. First, we see Chloë dressing up in a neutral setting, not in her private quarters, which gives us some breathing space. The basic premise is that the camera replaces the mirror, and so does the audience (as the mirror that looks back). Second, in “Mulholland Drive,” we see the amnestic Camilla standing in front of a mirror, in the bathroom, the most private of quarters. She is puzzled by Betty’s question, What’s your name? (In other words, Who are you?) The crucial element is that the large mirror is redoubled by a smaller one. And it’s exactly there that she sees the poster of Gilda as an image within the mirrored image. She names herself Rita. The image of Rita, whole and complete, responding to the lack of her own image. This is a delicate point, opening a two-way street. On the one hand, this moment can have an uncanny, alienating effect of not recognizing yourself. On the other hand, it can be soothing, offering a new shift or change in our perspective. Don’t we feel relieved when Camila/Rita finds her name in the mirror? However, in the relief, in the “this is me,” we must notice pressure and precipitateness, almost an overeagerness to find, to act.
The key element that links the three examples has to do with the intimate sphere, with the too-much constitutive of every identity, its kernel of non-identity. Why is there something so “other” about it? We might call it the unknowable, the ungraspable. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that this is about revealing, and that disclosing the intimate can quickly lead to shame, disgust, and to obscenity. Not only to the obscenity of private ticks and fancies but also to the obscenity of the audience’s position being pornographically reduced to nothing more than a camera’s eye. Revealing is always about revealing the too-much. The unbearable closeness. We need a more dignified approach than disgust. This also makes us see where exactly the film moves away from voyeurism logic, and where we can go beyond discovering someone’s nature, which is so much a part of criticism–searching for talent or holy authenticity, endlessly removing masks. This is not about relativizing talent; it is about recognizing that even the talents themselves must discover their talent, be it through someone else, and even cope with it, its contingency. Yet we, like Hannibal, not only discover someone’s true, uncorrupted nature, but the unnatural part of human nature as such — the unclaimable, foreign imp of silence. It is exactly here that the story of Hannibal and Clarice, Chloë and Camilla, moves away from pure voyeurism and the current ideology of naturalizing, away from success and talent. If there is anything truly political nowadays it is focusing on the natural, on the private scene, establishing a direct equivalence between success and nature, someone’s being. The current motto of happiness and positivity means that being happy, and recognized by others as fulfilled with talent, is directly linked to uncorrupted self. This means that the old space of responsibility and decision making, correcting mistakes, is slowly closing up since corrupted selves cannot be cured. They are now natural. Do you feel guilty that you’re not happy? Here we’re faced with the results: societal differences are now naturalized through the private sphere. Someone’s work is not important; someone’s ticks are. Therefore, we’re not losing the private sphere, we’re loosing the public sphere. In other, more fashion terms, this would entail a redirecting of our focus from biographies, penetrating someone’s world, to monographs, grasping someone’s work. To put it differently, someone’s work truly is for all, and has its own autonomy, never fully reduceable to the private. It seems that today the aspect of public—what is for all—clashes with the prevailing naturalization. Hannibal’s not writing Clarice’s biography, he effectively closes it, and literally helps her with her work.
There is, however, another aspect to this. The choice of Chloë Sevigny is telling, and no wonder she’s playing herself. The audience, eager to advance in fashion, perhaps wants to learn how she does it, to discover how she covets, something that is inscribed in her choices. Let’s connect this to Hannibal’s statement: “[Bill] covets.” Apart form rightly deeming that his murders are incidental, he says that Bill thinks he’s a transsexual, and we might add: because he thinks transsexuals have it, that they possess the prestigious know-how That’s why he identifies with them. It doesn’t suprise us then that, while standing in front of the mirror, putting on his make-up, Bill utters his explicit come-on. He compulsively announces his value with his tucked-in privates, just as in some designers’ W spread, taming that point of anxiety with the help of a mirror. This is key: even Rebellious Bill wants to be someone’s It Girl, trying to captivate someone’s desire in the mirror, seeing himself as captivating and captivated.
We can now safely say that Hannibal’s words aren’t moralism or gossip fodder. Are they simply an insult? Was Hannibal absent during the most basic lesson of good manners, that one shouldn’t mock others? Is that a way to live with others? Lacking respect? Don’t we feel that Hannibal’s words are much worse? Some sort of demistifying? What is there to demistify anyway? The underneath is not hidden. Demistyfing, like gossip “revelations,” only deepens the secret. Perhaps we should stick to that special point, to the too-much we didn’t expect to find. And rethink criticism or fashion journalism in general. “Silence of the Lambs” is — again — seemingly nonfashion, but it offers a whole new approach. Through the gutter. It gives us the power to go beyond disgust, to think and inspect those base elements, those reeking leftovers that are discarded as non-fashion, since beauty has no smell, when in fact they belong to it as its constitutive innards. The outside innards. If there ever was a true film about fashion, it is perhaps this one.
The crucial thing about Hannibal’s words is the moment of rupture, the pinpointing that derails a certain self-immersion or immersion of self, into self — into dressing up, for example. One could say that this is close to becoming self-conscious. Becoming or being self-conscious is not a path of progress, a cage of being unrelaxed, or of gradually becoming more and more self-conscious, constantly shedding. Maybe this is again just the necessary appearance of it all. Simply a new distance is introduced, a point or place of unplugging, a distance that can be alienating, yet it has a thoroughly disalienating effect. Here, we come close to seeing or perceiving anew, to gaining a new lens and seeing something new in the old, and not something old in the new, as in recognizing an historical reference in a piece of cloth. Perhaps this is what it all comes down to in the end, and this doesn’t hold only for style, fashion and the basic premise of self-consciousness inscribed in both: that silent moment in front of the mirror that freezes our perspective and throws it in our face. Announcing a shift. Nothing but the shift, its place. Shouldn’t this be done over and over again? Whereby we, like Clarice, not only gain a distance towards the past, but mostly towards the present? And isn’t fashion always about the present? More than we usually think.
What about Clarice’s defensive retort? Who are you to do this to me? We can now finally introduce that fashion moment of turning the tables. We won’t steer away from Chloé. Nor Clarice. Imitiation of Christ’s Spring/Summer 2002 show was a genuinely good effort in turning the tables. One might say that it was a wrong step in the right direction. One could also definitely say that the show was in some small way spiteful, basically about a designer’s anger and taking offence at not being properly recognized, returning the most basic reproach back to the critic: But what have you done? Since critics, especially those that write negative reviews and offend the Majesty, are seen as people that haven’t done anything, and therefore don’t know what they’re talking about, going beyond someone’s intentions or motivations. This was not my idea, not my goal. You don’t get me. Do designers get themselves? Can you ever really know without telling it or showing it to someone, without being truly self-critical? Are they never occupied with the question: but what have we done? Do they ever have the need to interpret their own work for themselves, or do they shirk it by just moving on too fast, firmly relying on their short attention span? No responsibility for consequences? They don’t matter, so why struggle with them. Move on fast. Fashion is just fashion anyway. Some fashionistas need those words of consolation.
Fashion is so explosive, exploding, spreading like a plague over everything. Yet it rarely implodes. Do you like that you like it? In the outer boundaries, constantly receding like the horizon, constantly turning into advantages, notice the appearance of the inner limit. The true place of creativity.
The current motto in fashion journalism is, of course, better editing, making something out of an amorphous mass of stuff. Editing over and over again. Focusing on everything means more and more focusing on nothing at all. Decisiveness in editing is just a capricious travesty of itself, lacking purpose or goals. Being free and explorative is an order. Freedom is connected to not caring about consequences, since freedom, supposedly, means having no boundaries or obstacles. This is the first vicious circle of double-binds. What goes for some designers could be said for some of the critics, of course. And can’t one imagine a freshly offended critic using Hannibal’s words, retorting back to Imitation of Christ: Do you think you can dissect me with this blunt little tool? Hopefully for some, the fashion critics aren’t as epicurean as Hannibal. Maybe they should be. What we get here, in the final instance, is again another form of a vicious circle of a sender’s messages being continually addressed back to him or her (What are you doing?). Something akin to two bald men fighting over a comb. So, who’s going to turn the other cheek, and break the cycle? Maybe both parties should. One usually criticizes what one does best – maybe that’s the real, albeit inadvertent, self-critical message of the show.
Anyway, the show was basically about reversal. The models were seated as critics, connoisseurs, buyers, etc. Holding the pens, scribbling away, scrutinizing the “unusual” suspects who, for them, should be the usual ones, taking photos, all the while the speakers churning the proverbial fashion sentences: “Move along!,” “She’s gained so much weight!” Once-overs. Everybody trying to read everybody, trying to stay ahead of the game. And that simply is the game itself. Frivolous remarks, irony, gossip, insults, pointless subversion, constantly pushing the envelope, etc. Pretty normal rules of today. Talk about fashion being on the forefront. A naive – and that’s putting it gently — conclusion: Just because it is under pressure to continually reinvent itself, fashion is supposedly immediately way ahead. Side effects of following rules that don’t present themselves as just that, as being rules. Be yourself! Be free! Experiment! How to effectively step out of this? How to really see where fashion is on the forefront? Maybe we first need to establish where it simply follows the times. Yet fashion exposes the times, and that’s already a possibility of a way out.
There was another interesting point to the show—the silent scribbling. What do the critics see? What will they write? The pressure of silence, of those who simply sit on their chairs and let others reveal themselves for them: critics as doctors, inspecting the body, looking for little signs, little leads, little wounds. For the love or fear of detail! The body is an important coordinate, especially since so much of fashion is about physicality. Sometimes, one feels that all the focus on the body—training it, succumbing to it, nurturing it—is only to give a touch of reality to all the fleeting fashions, providing it with some sort of ultimate reference. The body, as such, isn’t far from the societal and cultural. The social body. Societal and cultural divides are bodily divides through and through. Witness disgust: disgust at the unruliness of the body, its special parts, at the inner attacking the outer, at the unruly social elements, the lower classes coming out of the gutter, spoiling the surface, leaving a smell. Disgust tames and introduces a hierarchy. Not totally culture, not wholly nature. Behind morals, behind the unveiling or searching for the pure and unspoiled kernel of authenticity, behind the appeasing image of wholeness in the mirror, find its reverse, and be disgusted. Again: we need to travel from distance to closeness.
The fashion show itself already appears as some sort of silent body (of work) uttering, wanting to be inspected — by Clarice. A body abused by a skilled tailor, by Buffalo Bill. Tell me what has he done? What have they done? Words that critics can supposedly provide. What did the designer want to say? Well, the designer is saying something, and maybe it’s not only a question, maybe it’s unknowingly already an answer. Yes, but an answer to which question? Here, the critics themselves start to feel the pressure of the silent bodily question. And the roles are reversed. Constantly. Ambiguity creeps in. Something is therefore always amiss in this delicately loving “relationship,” something that skips from party to party, overturning every intention or motivation. Isn’t that the basis of interpretation? Nothing pleasant about getting one’s own message back. Truly feeling »it«. So, we should admit that every utterance, and every fashion show, goes beyond intentions, inspirations and motivations. That’s why we need to inspect them and then move away from them, and go further, with a little help from those telling details that point to another story, to themselves.
If anything, Hannibal’s lesson isn’t so much about a certain content, but the most basic thing of all: the way he procedes, his “how.” Which is all about the logic of looking, seeing, and then reading. An athleticism of the eye which holds for the entire visual domain. From time to time, it is important to truly shed everything, that arsenal of self-important knowledge, fashionably displayed through sophisticated vocabulary, recognizing all the grand fashion history references, be it present or past, and move to the most basic coordinates of visual logic of bel vedere. The logic of words that work as magnifiers, microscopes, focus lenses. And that try to hold in their phantom hands that special moment of self-consciousness, or shame, that point of shift, of throwing a new light — of that one detail that obviously sticks out and overturns everything, inviting us, forcing us to put what we know into brackets. Focusing therefore on what we already had, yet weren’t aware of.
Clarice’s lesson taken was simple: simplicity is key, all good things to those (who can still) wait. But mostly think how (not what) you covet, and you’ll get closer to Bill. And vice versa. The same holds for fashion. It was of course easy to notice the elements of the Hannibal-Clarice “relationship” in the sphere of fashion. It just seems that in fashion it’s not as generous and patient, and it’s far from being radical enough. It could be. This is all about the key element the fashion world already has, yet rarely takes real notice of it, maybe because so much is invested in it: namely first impressions. In inspecting the body. It’s as if they effectively discard them, disinfect them, by simply admitting their importance. But they should be taken as literally as possible, stripped of their grand garb. It is truly all there: the experience of the times and places, the people, the feel, the mood, the smell of that something else that needs to be pinpointed, and that is never ever pretty. They already have it. It is exactly this that our film example makes us see.
Wherefore fashion critics in a time of distress?
If we return to Imitation of Christ’s show, we could say that it displayed a basic misunderstanding of two different types of doing. The hidden »argument« here is the following: there is a difference between my actually doing something, while you just describe and write about it. All the talk is therefore irrelevant because it is not a direct manifestation, but always an after-the-fact lazy rendering. As if perception, perspective or interpretation stand outside as just observing, unable to touch the core of it all. Doesn’t a change in perspective also mean a change in what we perceive, the “how” changes the “what”? Interpretation not only reflects, it actively cuts into what it only merely, on the surface, renders. But doesn’t the same difference hold for fashion criticism as such: it is one thing to describe or recognize, report on trends, fabrics, colors, references, and completely another to actually produce or formulate something on one’s own. And back to fashion: it is one thing to reference all sort of historical epochs, updating and tweaking them, and completely another to actually formulate a true design statement. Should it surprise us, then, that most designers, in following their predominant deep nostalgic ways, swept away by past or present grandeur, simply do so to avoid true thought – intelligent design in the most literal meaning of the term.
And back to critics: doesn’t the same hold for the vast knowledge they so keenly display, for their power of recognizing the old in the new? Things cannot only get better, they first need to get worse. Maybe the first thing for a fashion critic should be a more irreverent approach to fashion design. Critics should reference shows and apparel to produce and formulate their own work that goes below the grandeur and beyond intentions or motivations. That is perhaps the only true way of staying true to the greatness of design. Thorough descriptions are key, they’re the springboard. It’s just that most designers would simply love it if the critics would only report and describe. I saw some pants, a bit of pleating, a lot of yellow… No doubt, those “critics” would be immediately employed.
What we need today, more than ever, is something that goes beyond recognizing and descriptive reporting, especially beyond a type of criticism that somehow still resorts to moralizing. Funny, but isn’t moralizing what people outside fashion mostly do? It is more than easy to moralize about such supposedly trivial, frivolous and irresponsible fancies as fashion is deemed to be. Some stereotypes, those that disefranchise fashion designers and give the opportunity to those supposedly outside the circus to do the same, are unfortunately best promoted by the insiders. If we move forward, we could say that, for instance, distinguishing the trends is the most basic procedure of them all. Recognizing or establishing an apparent leitmotiv, seeing what repeats itself from collection to collection, from one of Bill’s murders to the next. The question is how much cognizance or, even better, cognition is to be found in trend reporting. We still need it in terms of content, just the form of how it is given should change. Trend reporting is the first step of trying to gain a perspective on the chaos or mess, trying to introduce order into it, giving the appearance that order is somehow already present in it, that chaos is just a semblance. But we first need to see ourselves in the outside chaos we attack. Remember Hannibal’s words on Clarice’s map: Doesn’t this seem desperately random? As in: not random at all.
The question behind all of this is: how to truly construct some sort of map of where we are in terms of fashion design, of what we have, of what we have already done and are doing? Stepping back and becoming attentive. Sit back and analyse. We won’t go far without pinpointing all the inconsistencies, all those blind spots, little imps of silence which grandeur and luxury package-deals only superficially oppose since they’re built on them or around them. Inconsistencies are not only about noticing bad execution, lack of inspiration, vision, etc. We get closer by following that other current theme: “fashion reflecting the times.” Which in most cases doesn’t tell us anything about the times and even fashion. Is it too selective? How about reflecting that reflection first? Who decides what is reflected, what collection truly reflects something? There just is no outside position. Not only is fashion a part of its time, time is already inscribed in fashion, like in designers and critics themselves. Fashion already is the times on its own level. With all its dreams, lies, ghosts, failures, presuppositions, all of its paradoxes and inconsistencies. Critics need to scratch this way. Since some fashion designers are already doing it, articulating it for us through their work, having the audacity to even do it inside the frames of a particular luxury package-deal, putting the question before us of just how far we are willing to go and can go within certain self-imposed boundaries of luxury, drawing a new horizon within the old one, travelling vertically, not horizontally. It doesn’t matter if this is intentional or not. Most of the time it isn’t. But it is simply out there.
We could propose five points, five primary locations on our map: 1. body (how it is treated, what inscribes itself in it or on it; individual and societal overlapping); 2. time (from archives, memories, personal or otherwise, to legends, nostalgia, modernity, “futurism”); 3. idiosyncrasy (a particular designer’s vocabulary, visions, and the vocabulary of them all, style and fashion as such, as natural, social necessity, and pleasure); 4. tradition (how it was, is done and will be done: the techniques, all the savoir-faire, including business); 5. inconsistencies (that run through all the other points, cut through them). From here on, one must pass to concrete analysis of any given designer’s work.
How much more fashion “reflects.” Zeitgeist is not enough. It never was. So, there’s truly no need to disenfranchise fashion designers and the fashion scene. The bad ones will disqualify themselves. Let them speak and show. But that’s not even the point anymore. They all somehow show us — and the really good ones not only make things visible, they can also make us see and think.. Not only see something, sometimes just making us see can be enough. Teaching us also about our desire to see. How strong is it anyway? As strong as Clarice’s? Fashion is obsessed by the idea of witnessing, sitting on the edge of your seat and wanting to witness. Wanting to see. The horror of the new? Not likely. Wanting to see usually means wanting to regain or reconfirm the private feeling of property. It’s “new,” yet it has always already belonged to me. But not for long. This is all about wanting to sleep. When it comes to number 5. To the obvious, embodied outside. To the unveiled. The never-veiled, actually. So, if anything, we need more alienation today, there’s not enough of it, and the critics need to give us just that, take us out of our comfort zone… like Hannibal. The times are reproduced through mindsets, through mentality. Fashion is only one of its never-veiled embodiments. With N°5 written all over it. As the smell of the times. Going beyond the times because it already has a minimal distance towards the present, especially because it’s so immersed in it. When the question of What is modern? arises, we should move away from only answering what people want to wear now. What is modern is what we have, this vast display of designers’ work, and that one point of minimal distance to this present container where the question of future as such springs up. That is the time loop.
And time to conclude at the beginning. If we leave aside the question why Ridley Scott’s stylized sequel “Hannibal” was so anticlimactic, and at one point simply wrong, we could notice the recurring fashion themes: smelling the letter, Hannibal visiting a perfumerie in Florence, attention to telling details, picking someone’s brain (even literally), the opened fashion magazine with a Gucci advert, a face in it replaced with Clarice’s. And, yes, he will buy her the good Gucci shoes, and a dress to boot. She’ll finally look like she has a lot of taste.
It is commonplace to say that we are fascinated by evil figures “we love to hate.” True fascination is always about opposites, though, about simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Repulsion at what or whom? Just Hannibal? Maybe this goes even more for Bill. And mostly for the true repulsion, which is repulsion at oneself, of course. The shame, the self-consciousness, fearing thyself. Of what we support, of what we do, say and think. Saying it with second-rate shoes. But this self-repulsion should never be self-congratulatory. To be avoided. It should be attacked full force, fully tasted. New epicureanism. As the magazine in Hannibal’s “bird cage” says: Bon appétit.
About five months ago, Autre sent me an essay he had written about fashion criticism, using as his literary scalpel the film “The Silence of the Lambs.” I was intrigued, and after reading all 7,000 words, I said I’d publish it (with some trimming) on the blog. I especially liked how he saw a table-turning Imitation of Christ show.
Autre also revealed that his name is Marko. He is from Ljubljana, in Slovenia. He has studied art history, French language and literature, and he is now a junior researcher (and Ph.D candidate) in the department of art history, at the University of Ljubljana. When I started the blog, people told me it should follow a certain form, but, frankly, that idea just oppressed me. Why should fashion, which is so astonishing, perverse, neurotic and original, be confined to a form? So, here is your recommended reading in time for Fashion Week: Marko’s imaginative critique of fashion criticism, beginning with the keenly critical and hungry Hannibal.
Silence of Style
You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes?
If we think of the films that captivate the fashion world, “Silence of the Lambs” would probably not be among them. Yet not only does this film serve up some uncanny fashion points — from Buffalo Bill, the “couturier” who sews himself a new self from the flesh of others, to Hannibal’s stinging critique of Clarice’s attire — it also plays havoc with our assumptions about fashion and fashion criticism. It tells us how to see, and that perhaps we are not seeing enough or at quite the right distance to avoid moralizing, one of the traps in contemporary fashion criticism. If we long for a more intense, more cogent, more physical experience when reading about fashion, it may be because we need a new way of thinking about it.
In the script, Clarice’s appearance is rendered as sharply as one of Hannibal’s drawings. Her jailhouse attire is dully feminine, and she’s carrying her best bag that doesn’t match her second-rate shoes. Anxious, she passes Multiple Miggs’ cell. He can smell her, he says. Odor di femina. Odor di verità? Upon reaching Hannibal’s cell, she sees him lounging on his bunk, reading Italian Vogue. A deceptively prosaic moment omitted from the film. She introduces herself, but he wants to see her credentials first, saying: “Closer, clo–ser.” Things begin to fall into place: dress, smell, identity. Closeness. Anxiety. Screaming silence.
After glancing at her, he starts inquiring. What did Miggs say to her? Well, Hannibal says he can’t smell it himself. Nevertheless, he then proceeds to sniff the air,more expertly. He can tell she uses Evian skin cream, sometimes L’Air du Temps, but not today. A safe choice, a presumed traditionalist’s choice, as if she were going for the air of substance, buying identity, buying into rich history. And isn’t that what somehow unites Clarice with Buffalo Bill? Trying to get out, like that butterfly from its cocoon, by coveting a thing, having ambition? She comes to Hannibal in order to solve a problem, the case of Buffalo Bill, but this leads to another one — that silent scream of an innocent lamb being slaughtered like Hannibal’s victims. Triggered beyond control, it haunts her memory. No wonder Hannibal says to her that she needs to look deep within herself first — because she already has answers. Ask yourself what you see. Nothing remotely easy about exercising one’s eyes, seeing and reading. Having the power to avoid looking away. Remember Hannibal’s Belvedere: not just a beautiful view (of the Duomo in Florence) but also “to fully grasp with one’s eyes,” “to see properly, clearly.” Bel vedere. And won’t that be a town in Ohio where Bill lives?“I can see nothing.”
“On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.”
It’s almost funny how little Hannibal needs to read her. He strategically snaps and tells Clarice how she looks. Like a rube, a well-scrubbed rube with actually only a little taste. One generation away from poor white West Virginia trash. All she could do was dream of getting out. Clearly agitated by his ability to read her motives and common fears of being common, even though she never truly was, her retort is probably a mere defense. Nonethless, her point is crucial. “You see a lot,” she says. She is trying to turn the tables on Hannibal. In a moment, we will see how, and where, this happened in the fashion world.
Why all this reference to smell, to the smell of truth? And to surface, not depth? We’re not superficial enough, I guess. Maybe the most difficult thing of all is unveiling the obvious, something that is simply there, yet unnoticed. There is definitely a logic to the reference of smell, usually seen as the lowest sense of them all, where we’re supposedly closest to animals. A logic of elusiveness that we must retain. And isn’t smell always related to closeness? Well, if Hannibal sniffs things out, this simply means that, when it comes to truth, we cannot rely on old, firm, unchangeable methods. It means constant thinking, rethinking, discarding and starting from zero over and over again, even suspending what we already know. How should we take Hannibal’s words, pointing at Clarice? Should we simply learn from his procedure, apply it to a different domain, that of fashion? Is it truly a matter of applying or does the film echo something already present in the fashion world? When he snaps at Clarice, is it an insult, a basic, and base, critique of her fashion choices? Or, does he make things, herself mostly, a certain core of her identity, visible to her? If we were to opt for the first possibility, we could end up saying that Hannibal is some sort of critic, even a pretentious, petty arbiter of good taste and morals. Since good taste is still seen as cleanliness preserved, a sign of a progressive and spotless spirit, Hannibal could then be a judgemental moral catechist, possessed by the idea that “something bad is happening.” He could be standing as the corrective of our decadent times, when every standard is disintegrating. And somehow he wouldn’t be far from mere gossip mongers, since they share their logic with the Moral Majority, both being obsessed by what’s going on behind their neighbour’s door.
The second option is therefore more inviting, and it even throws a different light on the first possibility. With Hannibal’s words, by fearlessly accepting his quid pro quo, Clarice finds herself in the place of truth, faced with the opacity of her desire, and mostly Bill’s, of course. This doesn’t mean that Hannibal is the master of truth. He can simply pinpoint it with his words, provoking shame. No wonder he had to be conceived as a cannibal, as someone who will (literally) eat you up, taking everything from you, leaving you with perhaps only your ability to lose. Therein lays our fascination with him, with evil, and our enjoyment upon hearing his words, smelling and reading Clarice as if he were doing it to us.
Two other film examples, different yet closely linked, can take us further down the road of identity, a fashionable topic if we consider all the talk about individuality and being yourself. Marcelo Kraslicic’s short movie for Kai Kühne’s Myself, featuring Chloë Sevigny, and the bathroom scene from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” In both cases, we’re dealing with the mirror or the perils of the looking glass. First, we see Chloë dressing up in a neutral setting, not in her private quarters, which gives us some breathing space. The basic premise is that the camera replaces the mirror, and so does the audience (as the mirror that looks back). Second, in “Mulholland Drive,” we see the amnestic Camilla standing in front of a mirror, in the bathroom, the most private of quarters. She is puzzled by Betty’s question, What’s your name? (In other words, Who are you?) The crucial element is that the large mirror is redoubled by a smaller one. And it’s exactly there that she sees the poster of Gilda as an image within the mirrored image. She names herself Rita. The image of Rita, whole and complete, responding to the lack of her own image. This is a delicate point, opening a two-way street. On the one hand, this moment can have an uncanny, alienating effect of not recognizing yourself. On the other hand, it can be soothing, offering a new shift or change in our perspective. Don’t we feel relieved when Camila/Rita finds her name in the mirror? However, in the relief, in the “this is me,” we must notice pressure and precipitateness, almost an overeagerness to find, to act.
The key element that links the three examples has to do with the intimate sphere, with the too-much constitutive of every identity, its kernel of non-identity. Why is there something so “other” about it? We might call it the unknowable, the ungraspable. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that this is about revealing, and that disclosing the intimate can quickly lead to shame, disgust, and to obscenity. Not only to the obscenity of private ticks and fancies but also to the obscenity of the audience’s position being pornographically reduced to nothing more than a camera’s eye. Revealing is always about revealing the too-much. The unbearable closeness. We need a more dignified approach than disgust. This also makes us see where exactly the film moves away from voyeurism logic, and where we can go beyond discovering someone’s nature, which is so much a part of criticism–searching for talent or holy authenticity, endlessly removing masks. This is not about relativizing talent; it is about recognizing that even the talents themselves must discover their talent, be it through someone else, and even cope with it, its contingency. Yet we, like Hannibal, not only discover someone’s true, uncorrupted nature, but the unnatural part of human nature as such — the unclaimable, foreign imp of silence. It is exactly here that the story of Hannibal and Clarice, Chloë and Camilla, moves away from pure voyeurism and the current ideology of naturalizing, away from success and talent. If there is anything truly political nowadays it is focusing on the natural, on the private scene, establishing a direct equivalence between success and nature, someone’s being. The current motto of happiness and positivity means that being happy, and recognized by others as fulfilled with talent, is directly linked to uncorrupted self. This means that the old space of responsibility and decision making, correcting mistakes, is slowly closing up since corrupted selves cannot be cured. They are now natural. Do you feel guilty that you’re not happy? Here we’re faced with the results: societal differences are now naturalized through the private sphere. Someone’s work is not important; someone’s ticks are. Therefore, we’re not losing the private sphere, we’re loosing the public sphere. In other, more fashion terms, this would entail a redirecting of our focus from biographies, penetrating someone’s world, to monographs, grasping someone’s work. To put it differently, someone’s work truly is for all, and has its own autonomy, never fully reduceable to the private. It seems that today the aspect of public—what is for all—clashes with the prevailing naturalization. Hannibal’s not writing Clarice’s biography, he effectively closes it, and literally helps her with her work.
There is, however, another aspect to this. The choice of Chloë Sevigny is telling, and no wonder she’s playing herself. The audience, eager to advance in fashion, perhaps wants to learn how she does it, to discover how she covets, something that is inscribed in her choices. Let’s connect this to Hannibal’s statement: “[Bill] covets.” Apart form rightly deeming that his murders are incidental, he says that Bill thinks he’s a transsexual, and we might add: because he thinks transsexuals have it, that they possess the prestigious know-how That’s why he identifies with them. It doesn’t suprise us then that, while standing in front of the mirror, putting on his make-up, Bill utters his explicit come-on. He compulsively announces his value with his tucked-in privates, just as in some designers’ W spread, taming that point of anxiety with the help of a mirror. This is key: even Rebellious Bill wants to be someone’s It Girl, trying to captivate someone’s desire in the mirror, seeing himself as captivating and captivated.
We can now safely say that Hannibal’s words aren’t moralism or gossip fodder. Are they simply an insult? Was Hannibal absent during the most basic lesson of good manners, that one shouldn’t mock others? Is that a way to live with others? Lacking respect? Don’t we feel that Hannibal’s words are much worse? Some sort of demistifying? What is there to demistify anyway? The underneath is not hidden. Demistyfing, like gossip “revelations,” only deepens the secret. Perhaps we should stick to that special point, to the too-much we didn’t expect to find. And rethink criticism or fashion journalism in general. “Silence of the Lambs” is — again — seemingly nonfashion, but it offers a whole new approach. Through the gutter. It gives us the power to go beyond disgust, to think and inspect those base elements, those reeking leftovers that are discarded as non-fashion, since beauty has no smell, when in fact they belong to it as its constitutive innards. The outside innards. If there ever was a true film about fashion, it is perhaps this one.
The crucial thing about Hannibal’s words is the moment of rupture, the pinpointing that derails a certain self-immersion or immersion of self, into self — into dressing up, for example. One could say that this is close to becoming self-conscious. Becoming or being self-conscious is not a path of progress, a cage of being unrelaxed, or of gradually becoming more and more self-conscious, constantly shedding. Maybe this is again just the necessary appearance of it all. Simply a new distance is introduced, a point or place of unplugging, a distance that can be alienating, yet it has a thoroughly disalienating effect. Here, we come close to seeing or perceiving anew, to gaining a new lens and seeing something new in the old, and not something old in the new, as in recognizing an historical reference in a piece of cloth. Perhaps this is what it all comes down to in the end, and this doesn’t hold only for style, fashion and the basic premise of self-consciousness inscribed in both: that silent moment in front of the mirror that freezes our perspective and throws it in our face. Announcing a shift. Nothing but the shift, its place. Shouldn’t this be done over and over again? Whereby we, like Clarice, not only gain a distance towards the past, but mostly towards the present? And isn’t fashion always about the present? More than we usually think.
What about Clarice’s defensive retort? Who are you to do this to me? We can now finally introduce that fashion moment of turning the tables. We won’t steer away from Chloé. Nor Clarice. Imitiation of Christ’s Spring/Summer 2002 show was a genuinely good effort in turning the tables. One might say that it was a wrong step in the right direction. One could also definitely say that the show was in some small way spiteful, basically about a designer’s anger and taking offence at not being properly recognized, returning the most basic reproach back to the critic: But what have you done? Since critics, especially those that write negative reviews and offend the Majesty, are seen as people that haven’t done anything, and therefore don’t know what they’re talking about, going beyond someone’s intentions or motivations. This was not my idea, not my goal. You don’t get me. Do designers get themselves? Can you ever really know without telling it or showing it to someone, without being truly self-critical? Are they never occupied with the question: but what have we done? Do they ever have the need to interpret their own work for themselves, or do they shirk it by just moving on too fast, firmly relying on their short attention span? No responsibility for consequences? They don’t matter, so why struggle with them. Move on fast. Fashion is just fashion anyway. Some fashionistas need those words of consolation.
Fashion is so explosive, exploding, spreading like a plague over everything. Yet it rarely implodes. Do you like that you like it? In the outer boundaries, constantly receding like the horizon, constantly turning into advantages, notice the appearance of the inner limit. The true place of creativity.
The current motto in fashion journalism is, of course, better editing, making something out of an amorphous mass of stuff. Editing over and over again. Focusing on everything means more and more focusing on nothing at all. Decisiveness in editing is just a capricious travesty of itself, lacking purpose or goals. Being free and explorative is an order. Freedom is connected to not caring about consequences, since freedom, supposedly, means having no boundaries or obstacles. This is the first vicious circle of double-binds. What goes for some designers could be said for some of the critics, of course. And can’t one imagine a freshly offended critic using Hannibal’s words, retorting back to Imitation of Christ: Do you think you can dissect me with this blunt little tool? Hopefully for some, the fashion critics aren’t as epicurean as Hannibal. Maybe they should be. What we get here, in the final instance, is again another form of a vicious circle of a sender’s messages being continually addressed back to him or her (What are you doing?). Something akin to two bald men fighting over a comb. So, who’s going to turn the other cheek, and break the cycle? Maybe both parties should. One usually criticizes what one does best – maybe that’s the real, albeit inadvertent, self-critical message of the show.
Anyway, the show was basically about reversal. The models were seated as critics, connoisseurs, buyers, etc. Holding the pens, scribbling away, scrutinizing the “unusual” suspects who, for them, should be the usual ones, taking photos, all the while the speakers churning the proverbial fashion sentences: “Move along!,” “She’s gained so much weight!” Once-overs. Everybody trying to read everybody, trying to stay ahead of the game. And that simply is the game itself. Frivolous remarks, irony, gossip, insults, pointless subversion, constantly pushing the envelope, etc. Pretty normal rules of today. Talk about fashion being on the forefront. A naive – and that’s putting it gently — conclusion: Just because it is under pressure to continually reinvent itself, fashion is supposedly immediately way ahead. Side effects of following rules that don’t present themselves as just that, as being rules. Be yourself! Be free! Experiment! How to effectively step out of this? How to really see where fashion is on the forefront? Maybe we first need to establish where it simply follows the times. Yet fashion exposes the times, and that’s already a possibility of a way out.
There was another interesting point to the show—the silent scribbling. What do the critics see? What will they write? The pressure of silence, of those who simply sit on their chairs and let others reveal themselves for them: critics as doctors, inspecting the body, looking for little signs, little leads, little wounds. For the love or fear of detail! The body is an important coordinate, especially since so much of fashion is about physicality. Sometimes, one feels that all the focus on the body—training it, succumbing to it, nurturing it—is only to give a touch of reality to all the fleeting fashions, providing it with some sort of ultimate reference. The body, as such, isn’t far from the societal and cultural. The social body. Societal and cultural divides are bodily divides through and through. Witness disgust: disgust at the unruliness of the body, its special parts, at the inner attacking the outer, at the unruly social elements, the lower classes coming out of the gutter, spoiling the surface, leaving a smell. Disgust tames and introduces a hierarchy. Not totally culture, not wholly nature. Behind morals, behind the unveiling or searching for the pure and unspoiled kernel of authenticity, behind the appeasing image of wholeness in the mirror, find its reverse, and be disgusted. Again: we need to travel from distance to closeness.
The fashion show itself already appears as some sort of silent body (of work) uttering, wanting to be inspected — by Clarice. A body abused by a skilled tailor, by Buffalo Bill. Tell me what has he done? What have they done? Words that critics can supposedly provide. What did the designer want to say? Well, the designer is saying something, and maybe it’s not only a question, maybe it’s unknowingly already an answer. Yes, but an answer to which question? Here, the critics themselves start to feel the pressure of the silent bodily question. And the roles are reversed. Constantly. Ambiguity creeps in. Something is therefore always amiss in this delicately loving “relationship,” something that skips from party to party, overturning every intention or motivation. Isn’t that the basis of interpretation? Nothing pleasant about getting one’s own message back. Truly feeling »it«. So, we should admit that every utterance, and every fashion show, goes beyond intentions, inspirations and motivations. That’s why we need to inspect them and then move away from them, and go further, with a little help from those telling details that point to another story, to themselves.
If anything, Hannibal’s lesson isn’t so much about a certain content, but the most basic thing of all: the way he procedes, his “how.” Which is all about the logic of looking, seeing, and then reading. An athleticism of the eye which holds for the entire visual domain. From time to time, it is important to truly shed everything, that arsenal of self-important knowledge, fashionably displayed through sophisticated vocabulary, recognizing all the grand fashion history references, be it present or past, and move to the most basic coordinates of visual logic of bel vedere. The logic of words that work as magnifiers, microscopes, focus lenses. And that try to hold in their phantom hands that special moment of self-consciousness, or shame, that point of shift, of throwing a new light — of that one detail that obviously sticks out and overturns everything, inviting us, forcing us to put what we know into brackets. Focusing therefore on what we already had, yet weren’t aware of.
Clarice’s lesson taken was simple: simplicity is key, all good things to those (who can still) wait. But mostly think how (not what) you covet, and you’ll get closer to Bill. And vice versa. The same holds for fashion. It was of course easy to notice the elements of the Hannibal-Clarice “relationship” in the sphere of fashion. It just seems that in fashion it’s not as generous and patient, and it’s far from being radical enough. It could be. This is all about the key element the fashion world already has, yet rarely takes real notice of it, maybe because so much is invested in it: namely first impressions. In inspecting the body. It’s as if they effectively discard them, disinfect them, by simply admitting their importance. But they should be taken as literally as possible, stripped of their grand garb. It is truly all there: the experience of the times and places, the people, the feel, the mood, the smell of that something else that needs to be pinpointed, and that is never ever pretty. They already have it. It is exactly this that our film example makes us see.
Wherefore fashion critics in a time of distress?
If we return to Imitation of Christ’s show, we could say that it displayed a basic misunderstanding of two different types of doing. The hidden »argument« here is the following: there is a difference between my actually doing something, while you just describe and write about it. All the talk is therefore irrelevant because it is not a direct manifestation, but always an after-the-fact lazy rendering. As if perception, perspective or interpretation stand outside as just observing, unable to touch the core of it all. Doesn’t a change in perspective also mean a change in what we perceive, the “how” changes the “what”? Interpretation not only reflects, it actively cuts into what it only merely, on the surface, renders. But doesn’t the same difference hold for fashion criticism as such: it is one thing to describe or recognize, report on trends, fabrics, colors, references, and completely another to actually produce or formulate something on one’s own. And back to fashion: it is one thing to reference all sort of historical epochs, updating and tweaking them, and completely another to actually formulate a true design statement. Should it surprise us, then, that most designers, in following their predominant deep nostalgic ways, swept away by past or present grandeur, simply do so to avoid true thought – intelligent design in the most literal meaning of the term.
And back to critics: doesn’t the same hold for the vast knowledge they so keenly display, for their power of recognizing the old in the new? Things cannot only get better, they first need to get worse. Maybe the first thing for a fashion critic should be a more irreverent approach to fashion design. Critics should reference shows and apparel to produce and formulate their own work that goes below the grandeur and beyond intentions or motivations. That is perhaps the only true way of staying true to the greatness of design. Thorough descriptions are key, they’re the springboard. It’s just that most designers would simply love it if the critics would only report and describe. I saw some pants, a bit of pleating, a lot of yellow… No doubt, those “critics” would be immediately employed.
What we need today, more than ever, is something that goes beyond recognizing and descriptive reporting, especially beyond a type of criticism that somehow still resorts to moralizing. Funny, but isn’t moralizing what people outside fashion mostly do? It is more than easy to moralize about such supposedly trivial, frivolous and irresponsible fancies as fashion is deemed to be. Some stereotypes, those that disefranchise fashion designers and give the opportunity to those supposedly outside the circus to do the same, are unfortunately best promoted by the insiders. If we move forward, we could say that, for instance, distinguishing the trends is the most basic procedure of them all. Recognizing or establishing an apparent leitmotiv, seeing what repeats itself from collection to collection, from one of Bill’s murders to the next. The question is how much cognizance or, even better, cognition is to be found in trend reporting. We still need it in terms of content, just the form of how it is given should change. Trend reporting is the first step of trying to gain a perspective on the chaos or mess, trying to introduce order into it, giving the appearance that order is somehow already present in it, that chaos is just a semblance. But we first need to see ourselves in the outside chaos we attack. Remember Hannibal’s words on Clarice’s map: Doesn’t this seem desperately random? As in: not random at all.
The question behind all of this is: how to truly construct some sort of map of where we are in terms of fashion design, of what we have, of what we have already done and are doing? Stepping back and becoming attentive. Sit back and analyse. We won’t go far without pinpointing all the inconsistencies, all those blind spots, little imps of silence which grandeur and luxury package-deals only superficially oppose since they’re built on them or around them. Inconsistencies are not only about noticing bad execution, lack of inspiration, vision, etc. We get closer by following that other current theme: “fashion reflecting the times.” Which in most cases doesn’t tell us anything about the times and even fashion. Is it too selective? How about reflecting that reflection first? Who decides what is reflected, what collection truly reflects something? There just is no outside position. Not only is fashion a part of its time, time is already inscribed in fashion, like in designers and critics themselves. Fashion already is the times on its own level. With all its dreams, lies, ghosts, failures, presuppositions, all of its paradoxes and inconsistencies. Critics need to scratch this way. Since some fashion designers are already doing it, articulating it for us through their work, having the audacity to even do it inside the frames of a particular luxury package-deal, putting the question before us of just how far we are willing to go and can go within certain self-imposed boundaries of luxury, drawing a new horizon within the old one, travelling vertically, not horizontally. It doesn’t matter if this is intentional or not. Most of the time it isn’t. But it is simply out there.
We could propose five points, five primary locations on our map: 1. body (how it is treated, what inscribes itself in it or on it; individual and societal overlapping); 2. time (from archives, memories, personal or otherwise, to legends, nostalgia, modernity, “futurism”); 3. idiosyncrasy (a particular designer’s vocabulary, visions, and the vocabulary of them all, style and fashion as such, as natural, social necessity, and pleasure); 4. tradition (how it was, is done and will be done: the techniques, all the savoir-faire, including business); 5. inconsistencies (that run through all the other points, cut through them). From here on, one must pass to concrete analysis of any given designer’s work.
How much more fashion “reflects.” Zeitgeist is not enough. It never was. So, there’s truly no need to disenfranchise fashion designers and the fashion scene. The bad ones will disqualify themselves. Let them speak and show. But that’s not even the point anymore. They all somehow show us — and the really good ones not only make things visible, they can also make us see and think.. Not only see something, sometimes just making us see can be enough. Teaching us also about our desire to see. How strong is it anyway? As strong as Clarice’s? Fashion is obsessed by the idea of witnessing, sitting on the edge of your seat and wanting to witness. Wanting to see. The horror of the new? Not likely. Wanting to see usually means wanting to regain or reconfirm the private feeling of property. It’s “new,” yet it has always already belonged to me. But not for long. This is all about wanting to sleep. When it comes to number 5. To the obvious, embodied outside. To the unveiled. The never-veiled, actually. So, if anything, we need more alienation today, there’s not enough of it, and the critics need to give us just that, take us out of our comfort zone… like Hannibal. The times are reproduced through mindsets, through mentality. Fashion is only one of its never-veiled embodiments. With N°5 written all over it. As the smell of the times. Going beyond the times because it already has a minimal distance towards the present, especially because it’s so immersed in it. When the question of What is modern? arises, we should move away from only answering what people want to wear now. What is modern is what we have, this vast display of designers’ work, and that one point of minimal distance to this present container where the question of future as such springs up. That is the time loop.
And time to conclude at the beginning. If we leave aside the question why Ridley Scott’s stylized sequel “Hannibal” was so anticlimactic, and at one point simply wrong, we could notice the recurring fashion themes: smelling the letter, Hannibal visiting a perfumerie in Florence, attention to telling details, picking someone’s brain (even literally), the opened fashion magazine with a Gucci advert, a face in it replaced with Clarice’s. And, yes, he will buy her the good Gucci shoes, and a dress to boot. She’ll finally look like she has a lot of taste.
It is commonplace to say that we are fascinated by evil figures “we love to hate.” True fascination is always about opposites, though, about simultaneous attraction and repulsion. Repulsion at what or whom? Just Hannibal? Maybe this goes even more for Bill. And mostly for the true repulsion, which is repulsion at oneself, of course. The shame, the self-consciousness, fearing thyself. Of what we support, of what we do, say and think. Saying it with second-rate shoes. But this self-repulsion should never be self-congratulatory. To be avoided. It should be attacked full force, fully tasted. New epicureanism. As the magazine in Hannibal’s “bird cage” says: Bon appétit.
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